Evacuation modelling using Pyrosim

[Karina]

Good Day,

I've been working on a tunnel fire modelling and I am using a guide
user interface which is PyroSim. Things were progressing pretty well
until I am informed that I am also supposed to model an evacuation
during a fire in the tunnel. I have no idea where to start from. I
looked in the tutorials of PyroSim and it does not mention evacuation
modelling. Does anyone have any idea/suggestion what should I do next?

Thank you in advance,

AGABEYOGLU, Toros

[dr_jfloyd]

If you wish to use FDS+EVAC go to http://fire.nist.gov/fds and click
the FDS+Evacuation link. There are of course other approaches to
modeling evacuation some of which are discussed in the SFPE Handbook.

[charlie.thornton]

PyroSim does not (currently) provide any support for the EVAC features
packaged with FDS. You might get some traction out of the Additional
Records section. However, I think for FDS+EVAC some of the EVAC
properties are added to the VENT or SURF lines that are also used by
constructs known to PyroSim, so that might become a bit awkward.

The easiest route from PyroSim to FDS+EVAC would be to export your FDS
input file from PyroSim, then manually add in the EVAC parts before
running the simulation at the command line. This is shouldn't be too
painful, and I think looks like a pretty good approach in your
situation.

We are working on an evacuation simulator, but it shouldn't be used
for real jobs yet. You can learn more at the project web page:

http://www.thunderheadeng.com/pathfinder/

It's in open beta right now, so you can download the software and have
a look. The current beta can read your FDS input file (in a couple
weeks the beta will be able to read PSM files).

- Charlie

[David Mcgill]

charlie.thornton wrote:
> PyroSim does not (currently) provide any support for the EVAC features
> packaged with FDS.

Charlie,

Have you considered including support for the EVAC features in PyroSim?
I realize that it may be a bit contradictory, considering your
development efforts on Pathfinder, but I think EVAC will become the
default evacuation package in the future because of its links to FDS and
its price.

Dave

--
Dave McGill
Professor
School of Fire Protection
Seneca College of Applied Arts and Technology
1750 Finch Ave. E
Toronto, ON, M2J 2X5, Canada
416-491-5050, ext. 6186

[charlie.thornton]

We have thought about support for FDS+EVAC in various forms, but
you're right, we're in a strange place with FDS+EVAC. Usually we've
thought in terms of supporting FDS+EVAC in Pathfinder rather than
within PyroSim. I've never sat down and written out what it would
take to squeeze EVAC into PyroSim - it might be surprisingly little.

- Charlie

[TimoK]

Well, the user input for FDS+Evac is not yet optimized. First thing
that I should do is to make the evacuation specific geometric objects,
like DOORs and EXITs, to move similarly as OBSTs and VENTs to the grid
cell
"corners". I haven't yet done this, because at some point I was
thinking about doors, whose width could be something else than n*DX (
or DY), i.e., multiples of the mesh cell size. But for now, I'm more
or less decided to stick with n*DX. So, the user should specify the
evacuation mesh such that the DX and DY are nice. Say, dx=dy=30cm
means that your exit paths will be 0.9m, 1.2m, 1.5,... in width.

Second change will be, that the evacuation specific "outflow" vents
at the exit doors will be placed automatically and also the
"additional evacuation flow field meshes" are generated automatically.
But this change will not be made very soon. I will start thinking
this during this spring and hopefully after summer 09 it will work.

After these two things, it will be quite easy to add the missing
evacuation stuff to the FDS input text file generated by Pyrosim.
And after these modifications, it might be much easier to make
Pyrosim (or some other GUI) to write the FDS+Evac inputs to the
FDS input file.

- TimoK

[Emanuele Gissi]

On Jan 7, 3:31 pm, TimoK <tkorh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Well, the user input for FDS+Evac is not yet optimized. First thing
> that I should do is to make the evacuation specific geometric objects,
> like DOORs and EXITs, to move similarly as OBSTs and VENTs to the grid
> cell "corners".

> Second change will be, that the evacuation specific "outflow" vents
> at the exit doors will be placed automatically and also the
> "additional evacuation flow field meshes" are generated automatically.

Thank you TimoK! EVAC rocks.
Emanuele Gissi